My formative experiences were spending many weeks alone in the woods as a young child and, after dropping out of school at 13, hitchhiking alone around the eastern United States. The former imbued me with a permanent sense of wonder and an unshaken belief in magic. The latter showed me how freedom and fear may live side by side, revealed the generosity and depravity of my fellow humans, and animated my inborn desire to embrace the common good, to nurture justice and community in the world. These are the gifts that sustain me.

Fiction

Communion

She'd come across the dead skunk an hour ago. She’d been meandering along Sassafras Avenue, looking for names to add to her collection. It was an old part of the boneyard, people with eighteenth and nineteenth-century surnames: Barnabus, Mutterer, Winthrop, Cornelius. Lots of “Beloved Wife of” tombstones. Lots of unnamed babies with just the number of days they’d been alive here on this Earth. Read the story in Empty House Press.

At the Industrial Food Museum

Maritza's great-grandparents were ghosts, at least that's how Grandma Akilah spoke of them. But Maritza often felt them here with her in the early hours, along with the other ancestors stolen from her. Read Maritza's story in At the Industrial Food Museum from Gilbert and Hall's new anthology Green Magic: Stories of Hope and Power.

Human Remains

What strange inheritance did Uncle Kessem leave behind for Roger? Find out in The Saturday Evening Post.

The Kindness

It took me many years to know what had been important, what I should have done. She didn’t care whether I’d got to the West Coast I finally understood, way too late. She’d just wanted to know I’d survived. Instead, I’d let her worry, how much or little I couldn’t say. Read The Kindness in Still Point Arts Quarterly.

Excavations

I’d been here a few weeks in relative peace but now the park was being dug up all around me, and I was having trouble finding out why. At first I thought they were going to excavate and replant the flower beds and shrubberies. I panicked then about being displaced from my comfortable abode in the heart of the ancient rhododendron, which was larger than my last apartment and rent free. Read Excavations in Idle Ink.

Idyll

When Shoshana won that first election her breastbone and then her clavicle sopped up the violence, the stomping, whistling, clapping caldron she found herself immersed in; she felt the whisper of too many balloons released from the ceiling net brush strands of hair across her ear as they fell to confuse her ankles, but all she heard was the sultry gravel of her grandmother’s voice, that lifelong touchstone for whatever was right in the world. Read more in Canary - A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis.